What we are doing to convince people of the importance of gender in development isn’t working. We need to go beyond ‘target women’ approaches and bring back a focus on empowerment – and we really shouldn’t be afraid to be political.
When progress is slow and difficult, we often talk about how we are able to move two steps forward but then tend to slide one step back. When we were invited to write this opinion piece, we started to wonder whether, if we are really going to get gender taken seriously in fragile and conflict-affected situations, we might need to go back a bit in order to make progress – back to the concepts of the early ‘women in development’ approaches which were radical, politicised, heavily activist and feminist in nature…
Read the full blog: One step backwards two steps forward? Unlocking gender equality in fragile and conflict-affected situations
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Read the working paper: Gender-responsive budgeting in fragile and conflict-affected states – a review [^]